Dear Rosie,
Thanks for taking the time to get in touch.
That must have been almost ten years ago now! I’m so glad you still get pleasure out of the painting.
The Rose garden painting was one of the first pictures I made after leaving Glasgow school of art. In many ways I still view it as a formative painting, made at a time when the shine starts to come off the art school experience, a reality begins to dawn. I was living and working above Nice/sleazy on Sauchiehall street with lots of other people connected to the art school, crammed into a 3 bedroom flat like Art sardines.
My grandmother had unfortunately past away and I took the train down to Sheffield for the funeral. I arrived a day early and stayed in her house, ‘Crispin Gardens’, a terraced house with a wrough iron gate, and a garage door that had seized. Foxed carpets, net under curtains. I’ve not been back since.
I think i have an early memory of her tending her garden, although I could have made this up. Her name was Gertrude Parry, originally from North Wales, 9 brothers 2 sisters, mining stock. She moved to Sheffield after the war to find work as typist for a steel works. Her husband was a radiologist at the university, he died before I was born, I think I would have like to have met him. Bald pate with side wings, and mahogany window glasses. He was fired from the university hospital for repeatedly using hospital equipment to develop his own negatives. I’ve made shrines to these same negatives and scrutanized them for material. I’ve read his diary and looked through his note books, these unfortunately are illegable. Was this on purpose? a little piece, something he could keep for himself. Their gardening practices feature heavily/obsessively, along with precise domestic accountancy.
To me it is a portrait. My Nainy and Tidy and the life they made for themselves, TV Dinners and deckchairs in the summer. How they cared for those roses.
I spent that afternoon and evening taking photographs of it with the last of his Ilford 36 exposure films. His Tudor weapon camera made circa 1959, old reliable sits on my shelf with its atropined glass eye following me round the room while i paint.
I hope these photographs are still alive in the little film capsules, I’m never going to develop them, I imagine them in there roled up, a little screen of data we can share on the other side. before it was gone forever. I made this picture from memory.
I hope this bit of background helps in some way,
All the best,
Jack
Jack Donaldson 